Deception And Deception

The ability to deceive others is necessary in many social contexts. Before a child is able to deceive others, they must understand how other people 's minds work. Most people interpret the minds of others by the age of four (Schillinger, 2009). However, children with autism who are mentally four years old typically cannot identify the difference between mental and physical experiences (Baron-Cohen, 1989). This discrepancy can result in a child with autism to behave in a socially inappropriate manner and they may become ostracized from their peers. In fact, 46.3% of children with autism have been the victims of bullying (Sterzing, Shattuck, Narendorf, Wagner, & Cooper, 2012) because they have trouble forming healthy social relationships. Telling …show more content…
Theory of Mind (ToM) refers to the ability of an individual to predict what others may do based on what they infer about what others think and feel (Schlinger, 2009). The ability to detect and tell deceptive statements both require an individual to understand how and what others are thinking so they can correctly assess a situation and respond to it appropriately. Many psychologists believe that skills, such as perspective taking, that fall under the Theory of mind are unobservable. However, research has shown that such behaviors are observable, measurable, and teachable if researchers treat them as operant …show more content…
Deception skills involve the ability to detect when someone is deceiving you and the ability to convincingly deceive others. A study conducted by Ranick, Persicke, Tarbox, and Kornack (2012) was the first to succeed at teaching children with autism to detect when others were lying to them. They focused specifically on lies in which another student tried to exclude them or take their possessions. Using behavioral skills training consisting of rules, modeling, roleplay, and immediate feedback, they were successful in teaching the participants to detect lies (Ranick et al. 2012). In a more recent study, researchers investigated how to teach children with autism how to lie. Using the same behavioral skills training as Ranick et al. (2012) they attempted to teach children with autism to convincingly lie when presented with an undesirable gift and when someone 's appearance changed in an undesired way (Bergstrom, Najdowski, Alvarado, Tarbox, 2016). This study also found the behavioral skills training method was an effective way to teach children with autism deception skills. Both studies showed deception was a learnable skill and is influenced by the environment like all other